It’s Memorial Day weekend. Summer is here! I love that we have all four seasons in the Carolinas, all neatly predictable in three month slots. Three months of Spring was filled with a visit from the in-laws, a test of my gardening skills and Spring Break.
With love from South Africa
Growing up, we lived too far from family too see them more than once or twice a year. Most of my closest relatives lived about a thousand kilometres away from Johannesburg or as far as the distance between New York and Charlotte. We would road trip to the farm or to Cape Town once a year, usually around Christmas time, sometimes for Easter. Not wanting to miss any birthdays, my Grandmother sent us surprise packages that usually arrived around birthdays. Even though I can’t recall their content, I can remember the excitement and anticipation of opening those cardboard boxes and poring over the tiny details on the postage stamps. Whatever treasures came out of those boxes always smelled like my grandparents’ house. Sometimes when I open one of her recipe books I can still smell that house in the aging pages.
In this tradition, I love getting care packages from home!
My in-laws brought wine, Bar Ones and Woolies rusks. I will pay good money to get my hands on a recipe for these Muesli Rusks from Woolworths*!
*A South African version of Marks & Spencer – not the Woolworths you’re thinking of.
Spring Break
Having family around was also a great incentive to go exploring. We did a spur of the moment road trip to a strip of the North Carolina coast called Outer Banks. This area is a long and in some places narrow stretch of islands that separates North Carolina from the Atlantic ocean. The slogan on our NC number plate is “First in Flight” – the reason for this is that Wright brothers made their first successful flight in an area called Kill Devil Hills in Outer Banks.
The Wright Brothers museum
Outer Banks is also famous for wild horses on beaches only accessible by 4×4. As our luck would have it, my current status as Real Housewife** means that I drive from car pool lane to Harris Teeter to play date to Taekwondo to the park in a Ford Explorer just perfect for this occasion. Driving on Corrolla beach was certainly a bucket-list experience.
** Some of you will find this fact amusing. For your entertainment: I just served Xman an after school snack of banana bread still warm from the oven. Made from scratch. Ha!
Now, marketing material will sell you “Wild Mustangs”. We did manage to spot a “wild horse”. LOL. I suspect that my idea of a wild horse was constructed by the covers of romance novels I used to sneer at in Exclusive Books while heading for the business and marketing aisle instead. The wild horses in Outer Banks are descendents of Spanish Mustangs, also known by their not suitable for marketing name as “banker ponies”. Wikipedia describes them as small, hardy, and with a docile temperament. Indeed.
“Wild mustang.” Not quite what I had in mind, but a memorable and fun experience nonetheless.
Driving North / North East is very interesting. We drove over amazing bridges, through a swamp (with swamp people!) and past an alligator in said swamp. There are plenty of towns I want to return to, but also many places where, as my husband puts it, at least they have a sense of humor even if they have nothing else.
As far as road trips with kids go, ours behaved relatively well. (Trust me, we’ve experienced the awful kind too, like the time our baby girl threw up all over herself in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles from a gas station. Fun times.) I can highly recommend his and hers DVD players, if your car doesn’t have them already.
We fit in another (shorter) drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway just before Ouma and Oupa returned to SA. The plan is to see “America’s favorite drive” in every season, we saw the forests on fire in the Fall, and then we met a snowstorm coming in for Winter. For our Spring trip, we drove through the clouds.
Above the cloud. Image credit: My father in law.
Inside the cloud. Image credit: My father in law.
Yard is a four letter word
Some people don’t like cooking. Others don’t like Coldplay. For me, it’s gardening. The words “yard work” give me hives.
I come from a long line of green fingers. My maternal grandmother could grow anything. My paternal grandfather had the greenest grass in the hard, unforgiving vlaktes of the Northern Cape’s Karoo. My parents and my husband’s parents have beautiful gardens alive with birds and blooms. Even in winter. I have never been able to keep even a potted house plant alive. I am the reason landscapers and garden services exist!
So Spring holds a special kind of terror for me: The expectation of things going green.
There are few things that irk neighbors more than an unkempt yard. If you could see the Facebook tirades on out of control weeds you’d fear for your life.
An unmanicured lawn will get you branded as a bad neighbor. Nobody wants to be a bad neighbor.
Thank goodness for family. My gardening angel of a mother in law saved the day (and the shrubs). Even with her ankle still healing from a bad break she made all the difference in what could have been downright ugly. I am so incredibly thankful for that! All that is left for me to do is to remember to water the garden. (Easier said than done. I have one kid that wants to water the driveway and the other is entertained by my horror as she tries to escape into the direction of the road.)
The start of Summer.
The last weekend in May marks the official start of Summer. The pool opens, the air is filled with the gentle hum of lawnmowers, and grills are dusted off for the official season of outside entertaining***. Memorial Day is also the day Americans remember those who died while serving the country’s armed forces. Flags fly high outside homes and most will continue to fly until the end of Summer (isn’t it interesting that most homes here have flag poles?). We’ll see the fireworks in South Carolina from our North Carolina house (due to differing state laws about fireworks and the fact that we literally live across the road from SC).
***Our grill doesn’t get a chance to get dusty. A South African knows a good braai has no season.
My sweet boy has been learning about Memorial day at school too. Today, as we were driving past a graveyard, he suddenly said: “Wait. Is this were they plant the soldiers?”
You’ve got to love the innocence of childhood.
TTFN.
A little big adventure. 